Aimée Walsh: Exile tells the story of Fiadh, a young Belfast woman making the transition from school in Belfast to university in Liverpool. Historically, the two places are separated by the Irish Sea, and not much else. Both are windy, waterside cities whose Edwardian avenues give the impression of being built for generations of people long gone. Both are also places that feel like their last chapter has already been written.
The novel begins with Fiadh in her last school days, stuck between home life and the dingy network of student flats that passes for freedom. The Belfast she inhabits is all cheap drink and diminished ambition, the monotony of the scene punctured by the staccato of its drunken narratives. The effect is somewhere between Nikolai Gogol and Sally Rooney, Lavery’s the dark heart of a bohemian quarter whose arteries wind past the chip shops into the Holylands.
As a first novel, Exile is a collage of different styles and settings. Walsh’s descriptions of the university seminar room have all the awkwardness of any public meeting between self-revelation, social class and introversion. She manages such scenes with a touch that is lightly wry, which is no small achievement for a book of such dreadful weight.
The gravity of violence can weigh a novel down into predetermined forms. Exile, instead, is various and ghostly, with the trace of other novels, films and television dramas. This gives it an occasionally uneven tone, and a slight imbalance in pace that gains better rhythm later. The characters of Danielle and Aisling are well, if not sympathetically drawn, and the manipulative Andy exposed for his narcissism, and for his violence.